Why the NPCIL Must Be Stopped from Commissioning Koodankulam

India’s leading political commentator and environmental activist, is
associated with the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP)

When it comes to thrusting nuclear power down the throats of
unwilling people, official India sets a record of violations of dignity
and rights that is embarrassing. Which other government but India’s
maligns all anti-nuclear protesters as foreign-inspired and lacking any
agency? Where else would the police file 107 FIRs against 55,795
peaceful anti-nuclear protesters, but at Koodankulam, charging 6,800
with “sedition” and “waging war against the State”? And which other
government has asked a psychiatric institution, in this case, the
National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro-Sciences (Nimhans), to
“counsel” people and convince them that the project, despite the
hazards, is good for them?
To its discredit, Nimhans despatched psychiatrists to Koodankulam to
“get a peek into the protesters’ minds” and help these insane people to
“understand the importance” of the plant. According to reports quoting
its director, Nimhans has “commenced the collection of primary data” and
is now seeking “field reactions” to write “multiple strategies” to
address “the problem” (the opposition to nuclear power). Such opposition
is thus equated with schizophrenia, fear of sexual intimacy, paranoia
or craving for victimhood, to be cured by drastic means. By this
criterion, more than 80% of the people of Japan, Germany, France and
Russia – who oppose new nuclear plants – must be considered abnormal.
However, five in under 15,000 reactor-years of operation worldwide
hitherto translates into one meltdown every eight years in one of the
globe’s 400-odd reactors. The question is if humanity can afford any
meltdowns, with their destructive consequences, for multiple
generations. There’s no reason why a meltdown would cause in India fewer
than the 34,000-70,000 cancer deaths estimated conservatively from
Chernobyl. According to a study, a single meltdown would cost Germany
the equivalent of twice its GDP. The damage in India would be similar.
Leaving aside accident probability, it’s not remotely irrational to
regard nuclear power as inherently irredeemably hazardous, and nuclear
plants or uranium mines as bad neighbours which can cause damage. Fear
of and loathing for nuclear power is shared by millions worldwide. Their
numbers have grown exponentially after Fukushima. Indeed, it couldn’t
have been otherwise.
If anything, then, the really delusion-prone people are on the other
side, in the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and Nuclear Power
Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL). The day the Fukushima crisis took a
turn for the worse last year, with hydrogen explosions ripping through
three reactors, DAE secretary Sreekumar Banerjee said the blasts were
“purely a chemical reaction and not a nuclear emergency …”. NPCIL
chairman SK Jain went one better: “There is no nuclear accident….It is a
well-planned emergency preparedness programme …”
The explosions were chemical reactions. But the very presence of
hydrogen indicated severe nuclear fuel damage. The explosions further
ruptured plant structures, aggravating the three meltdowns and releasing
huge quantities of radiation. The leaks were at least two-and-a-half
times greater than earlier feared, and the quantity of caesium-137
released was officially estimated at 160 times that from Hiroshima.
The government fails to comprehend the cardinal truth that after
Fukushima, the safety of inherently hazardous nuclear power can no
longer be analysed from the usual “expert” perspective of what’s likely,
but must consider what seems impossible within conventional frameworks.
As the official German Ethics Commission on nuclear safety recently
said, after Fukushima, the perception of nuclear risks has changed
decisively: “More people have come to realise that the risk of a major
accident is not just hypothetical, but that such major accidents can
indeed occur.”
Fukushima occurred in an industrially advanced country, still hasn’t
been brought under control, and exposed the limitations of the
technological risk-assessment methods used by the nuclear industry. Says
the Ethics Commission: Fukushima “has shaken people’s confidence in
experts’ assessments of the ‘safety’ of nuclear power stations. … [They]
are no longer prepared to leave it to committees of experts to decide
how to deal with the fundamental possibility of an uncontrollable, major
accident.”
Our nuclear “experts” regurgitate clichés about safety and the
Russian reactors’ “superior design”. But they don’t have access to the
full design. The government has misled on Koodankulam. In September, it
suspended work until people’s safety concerns were allayed by an
official “expert group”. This manifestly failed. The group refused even
to meet the independent scientists nominated by the People’s Movement
Against Nuc-lear Energy, or answer their queries.
Koodankulam raises safety issues both specific to the site, and
generic nuclear hazards. The reactors haven’t been certified safe by
independent agencies. A recent report by Russian nuclear safety experts
says Russian reactors are under-prepared for natural and man-made
disasters and have 31 “serious flaws”, including absence of regulations
to deal with contingencies; inadequate protective shelters; lack of
records of previous accidents, and poor attention to electrical and
safety-significant systems. The earthquake hazard isn’t considered in
designing Russian reactors.
The site-specific issues include the plant’s impact on people and
fisheries, lack of secure waste storage, and vulnerability to tsunamis
caused by massive agglomerations of loosely-bound seabed sediments,
volcanic eruptions, and geological and hydrological instability.
Koodankulam is probably the world’s sole nuclear plant with no
independent freshwater supply.
The NPCIL is rushing to commission Koodankulam while bypassing Atomic
Energy Regulatory Board safety procedures, like an emergency evacuation
drill in a 16-km radius before fuel-loading, and the stipulation that
there must be zero population within a 1.5-km radius, and only a sparse
population within a 5-km radius. The NPCIL must be stopped.